Spirent Communications, on Friday announced that it strengthened the network security of Interop Tokyo. At Interop’s request, Spirent provided a managed scan of the event network through Spirent’s SecurityLabs service, successfully detecting potentially serious issues. After these issues were remediated, Spirent performed a further test of the network before the event’s opening, in time for the 140,000 attendees to log on with assurance.

“As a result of the outstanding security assessment performed by Spirent/Toyo, overlooked vulnerabilities were found on more than 600 products and operating systems. The remediation recommendations in the assessment report helped us take the required measures quickly, which enabled us to have a more secure network in place in a timely manner,” said Takashi Tomine, ShowNet NOC Generalist.

As part of the unauthenticated managed scan, SecurityLabs performed numerous tests on the exposed hosts and services using both automated and manual techniques. Industry-leading proprietary software was used for fingerprinting the network to find issues that could potentially lead to hacks. Had Interop not requested the scan of the event’s communications backbone, despite its best efforts at security, hackers could have used remote code execution to access the devices of registrants, exhibitors and staff, steal personal information, crash the system entirely and do other damage.

“It means a lot to us that Interop Tokyo chose Spirent to boost the network security of such a high-profile, globally respected event. The SecurityLabs automated scanning service is an on-demand system for hunting down possible exploits such as unsupported operating systems, missing patches, outdated software, misconfigured hosts, common web application vulnerabilities and misconfigurations, and more. It’s the best service out there to detect vulnerabilities for a network perceived to be secure,” said Sameer Dixit, senior director of security consulting at Spirent.

It’s not the first time Interop has sought out Spirent’s support in improving cyber-security for the event. Last year, Interop worked with SecurityLabs for a smaller-scale test—a scan of the event’s web properties.